Posted on 07/27/2006 2:40:34 PM PDT by beckett
Why does the president call the secretary of state "Condi"? And what exactly is his philosophy?
Thursday, July 27, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
Why does President Bush refer in public to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as "Condi"? Did Dwight Eisenhower call his Secretary of State "Johnny"? Did Jimmy Carter call his "Eddie," or Bill Clinton call his "Maddy," or Richard Nixon call his "Willie" or "Hank"? What are the implications of such informality?
I know it is small, but in a way such things are never small. To me it seems a part of the rhetorical childishness of the age, the faux egalitarianism of the era. It reminds me of how people in the administration and Congress--every politician, in fact--always refer to mothers as moms: We must help working moms." You're not allowed to say "mother" or "father" in politics anymore, it's all mom and dad and the kids. This is the buzzy soft-speak of a peaceless era; it is an attempt to try to establish in sound what you can't establish in fact.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
1. The times in which we live are far less formal than in times past.
2. To a considerable degree how one addresses others and wishes to be addressed is a matter of taste, making it no one's business other that the individuals, themselves.
3. GWB, the First Lady and the Secretary of State have known each other for at least seven years (maybe longer). In addition to their working relationship, they are close social friends, and Ms. Rice is a frequent guest of the first couple in their private lives. So GWB is long accustomed to calling her Condi, which is, after all, her name.
4. I should think that if Ms. Rice wishes to be addressed more formally in public, she would have no hesitation whatsoever in asking the President to do so.
5. Peggy Noonan is a stuffed shirt whose gauzy, poorly focused, often silly observations are not worth a warm bucket of spit (to borrow that colorful, apt phrase). Her complaint that the President called the Secretary of State Condi in public has got to be one of the most petty things I've seen in an exceedingly petty business.
I've been noticing this sort of article and Meme a lot in the last 2 weeks. I think the paleo-cons are trying to reassert their influence on the conservative debate.
That is a bold face lie! You two should be ashamed of yourselves. There was no cut and run from Beirut or Hezbollah. Such distortion of the historic facts will not help Bush`s popularity among Americans. Bush`s popularity is at rock bottom for good reason. But that's a different debate.
The US Marines were sent into the Beirut airport complex as part of a multinational peackeeping force. In reality, the Marines were thrown into the middle of a civil war and placed in harms way without proper rules of engagement permiting them to defend themselves, or with strong enough security measures around the airport building to protect them from outside attack. The Marines were doomed from the get-go. US intelligence was unable to determine who committed the horrible act.
Some experts believed the responsibile party was Hezbollah, supported and encouraged by Iran, Syria and Lebanese Druze. Some say it was a Shia terrorist group. Islamic Jihad and several militant Shiite groups, like the Free Islamic Revolutionary Movement took claim for the attacks.
Following the barracks truck bombing, the Reagan administration hatched a plan to knock off a military barracks of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. DefSec Weinberger opposed such action. Weinberger told Reagan, any attack without positive proof of who committed the truck bombing, would lead to an expanded civil war dragging in other Arab nations, maybe pulling the Soviets into the conflict, and undermining Reagan's efforts to win the Cold War.
In a September 2001 PBS Frontline interview, former DefSec Weinberger said: "we still do not have the actual knowledge of who did the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport, and we certainly didn't then".
After Reagan ordered the air strikes from the aircraft carriers Independence and Kennedy, and offshore shelling from the USS New Jersey, it became obvious to the President that Beirut and all of Lebanon for that matter, was an untenable situation for US forces. In February-March 1984, US military forces were finally pulled out for good. Reagan made the right decision.
As I said, it's easy to look back with 20/20 hindsight and say Reagan was negligent for his lack of action. Fact is, if Reagan was given clear evidence who committed the killing of the US military personnel, he would have taken stronger action then he did. The military attacks Reagan ordered were appropriate and adequate under the circumstances of that time. While the Marine barracks bombing was a contributing factor in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the ME, it wasn't the cause.
So, you guys can ignore me all you want. I will always be around to defend Reagan from the likes of liars like you two.
Well, then shame on Reagan for permitting our Marines to be put into a doomed position from the get go.
I would be willing to bet $100 that, in private, The President calls her Condi, and she calls him Mr. President.
Just curious...on what do you base that assertion?
Reagan was President when the Beirut bombings took place. It happened on Reagan's watch. Reagan took full responsibilty. He hit back at the terrorists with the best intelligence availalble to him at that time. After a year and half in Beirut, Reagan said it was time to pull out. Mission accomplished? Maybe not.
For the mission to have been accomplished, it would have taken a longer term committment from ALL the members of the multinational peacekeeping force. That wasn't about to happen. Beirut Lebanon had turned into an untenable situation at that time.
My problem with you is all about the aftermath. You've got it all wrong. Employing 20/20 hindsight as you have, doesn't give you legitimacy on this issue. If Reagan were to have acted alone, according to what you deem as proper action, the US would have expanded the Lebanon civil war, into an extremely dangerous hot war. That scenario would have pulled other Islamic states into the war and maybe the Soviets would have entered into the action too. Truth be told, I don't believe the American people were ready to see several thousand Americans, or maybe more, killed in Lebanon. Vietnam was still fresh in peoples minds. Full engagement by the US military, in response to the 241 military personnel killed in the barracks bombing, wasn't possible. And Congress would never have agreed to such an action.
The world of 1980`s was different then the world of today. 20/20 hindsight is an easy method of criticzing Reagan. Just not a valid method of reasoning.
Ahem. Not to be picky or anything, but I haven't said what a proper course of action would have been. But I can tell you this, leaving Lebanon wasn't it.
I haven't advocated going after jihadists and starting another war on another front. But finishing the mission might have been nice.
"When Reagan screwed up in Lebanon years ago, all his official formality and all Peggy's speechwriting didn't means squat. We left the Middle East with our tail between our legs, and all that did was tell the world we weren't powerful enough to act."
That mistake is part of what has driven Al Qaeda and the other terrorists to the conclusion that we are not ready to fight for what we believe in. When Mr. Reagan pulled us out of Beirut I was extremely disappointed in him. His action became part of the problem that has now bloomed into a full scale war.
You think that it was a success? America screwed up in Lebanon, and we paid for it long after.
The terrorists didn't see it as an American success, neither the PLO, Hezbollah or al Qaeda's bin Laden- and since Peggy's talking about perceptions here's a reason that etiquette and nicknames are far less important to international perception than action :
"Likewise, let me remind you of the defeat of the American forces in Beirut in 1982, soon after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when the Lebanese resistance was personified by the truck laden with explosives that struck the main military base of the US Marines in Beirut, killing 242 soldiers - towards Hell was their destination and what an evil destination that is.
Then after the Second Gulf War, America deployed her forces to Somalia and killed over thirteen thousand sons of the Muslims therein, before the lions of Islam from amongst the 'Arab Afghans' and their brothers from that region pounced upon her and rubbed her arrogance into the dust, killing scores of them, destroying their tanks and downing their aircraft.
Thus, America and her allies fled in the darkness of the night without disturbing the attention of anyone so Praise and Glory be to Allah for this. During that same period, the young Mujahideen prepared for them explosives in Aden and after their detonation, the cowardly Americans ran away and fled the country in less than 24 hours...
----- Bin Laden, message released Feb 14, 2003
Oddly enough, anyone who knows about Somalia knows we kicked Somali butt in that battle... but because we ran away afterward, the perception over there was that we were cowards, in spite of the valour of our fighting men.
If the terrorist leaders get to live to fight another day, they will, and in their eyes they've won. That's why they and the UN like peacekeeping missions so much- the terrorists get to live and learn while our own resolve dissolves. We got into a "peacekeeping" mission- read that as a mission where the terrorists get to live and our own forces aren't even allowed to keep their weapons loaded. We got into it at a time congress didn't have the necessary will to fight terror.
The first shot fired in Mugniyah’s war against the West was fired on April 18th, 1983, in Beirut. On that day, a van packed with 2,000 pounds of explosives slammed into the front of the U.S. embassy and exploded with such tremendous force that the front of the building collapsed. The attack killed 63 people, including most of the CIA’s Middle East leadership. Within hours of the attack, Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. A clue concerning the real perpetrators of the suicide bombing was picked up by U.S. intelligence a month later, when it was revealed that a pre-attack cable from the Iranian foreign ministry had been sent to the Iranian embassy in Syria approving funding for a terrorist attack in Beirut.The suicide attack against the Beirut embassy was followed up later that year by an even more devastating assault. On the morning of October 23rd, most of the 300 Marines stationed in a compound near Beirut’s airport were sleeping in their barracks, having been deployed to the country to serve as a stabilization force. Then, at 6:33 am, the driver of a Mercedes truck drove straight through the front gate of the compound, past Marine sentries with unloaded weapons, and smashed into the four story concrete barracks. The driver, who reportedly was smiling, then detonated the explosive, estimated to equal the force of 12,000 pounds of TNT. The effects of the massive truck bombing were horrific, killing 220 Marines and 21 other U.S. service members. Again, Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.
In one day, the entire situation in Lebanon had been drastically altered. The foreign forces would soon leave, wary of further terrorist attacks. With the abandonment of Lebanon by the international community, Islamic Jihad had carried out a virtual terrorist coup d’etat. Over the next ten years, Mugniyah and Hezbollah went on a rampage, taking dozens of Westerners hostage and murdering several others.
Major operations included the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985, where Mugniyah’s men shot a US Navy diver in the head and threw his body on the tarmac of Beirut International Airport. In a case that recalled the horrors of William Buckley, US Marine Lt. Colonel William Higgins was abducted in 1988 by a Hezbollah linked group known to be under the direct command of Mugniyah. Two years later, a ghastly video was released showing a man, thought to be Colonel Higgins, hanging from a ceiling after being tortured. Shortly thereafter, the dead body of Colonel Higgins was dumped on the side of the road in front of the US embassy in Beirut.
Numerous hostages, such as American Kurt Carlson, recall seeing Mugniyah supervise their imprisonment and brutal interrogations. He spoke fluent English, and commanded slavish devotion from his agents. At the same time, the CIA believes Mugniyah was in frequent contact with Iranian intelligence officials, who were directly involved in the murders and the hostage takings. It is a relationship that blossomed in Lebanon and continues to this day....
---------- "Tehran's Terror Master," by Patrick Devenny, Front Page Mag, 5/26/2005"0 people, let not this force frighten you. Let not the power of America and its army frighten you, for by Allah we have struck them multiple times and routed them again and again. They are most cowardly of people when the armies meet." ------- Bin Laden, message released Feb 14, 2003
Bin Laden screwed up by thinking past results predict future returns, by thinking we would always run away.
If that's all you've got, you may as well make it purple.
The facts are there that Reagan never went after the murderers of 241 Marines, unlike Reagan automatically blaming Lyba for the bombing of the West Berlin disco that killed US servicemen.
It was "cut and run" back then and now.
If the US wanted to stay on its own, that would have meant the US military would have to handle everything. The entire burden would have fallen on America's shoulders. That would have meant all out war. That wasn't about to happen and you know it. IIRC, no one at the time was calling for the US to stay in Beirut and fight another protracted war.
OTOH, the first WTC attack in 1993 ---- which was the first foreign led attack on the US homeland since the War of 1812 and the first attack on US territory since Pearl Harbor ---- and the subsequent attacks on the Khobar Towers, the attacks on the US embassies in east Africa and finally, the attack on the USS Cole, are a completely different set of events. If Clinton would have responded to those attacks in the 1990`s with stronger military actions, OBL and AlQaeda may have taken a different course of action for the short term. We will never know.
Suffice it to say, 9-11 happened on Bush`s watch. The WOT continues and I support the President. Hopefully, this is the beginning of the end for international terrorism and not the beginning of the end for western civilzation.
Okay. It did seem like we cut and ran, but if that's an unfair interpretation, I'm not going to argue. And I agree about the WOT.
By 1993, one of OBL`s chief terrorists, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was financing his nephew Ramzi Yousef`s plan to bomb and bring down the twin towers of the WTC site. That was the event that should have changed everything for America. It didn't and we paid the price in subsequent years with many more terrorist attacks on US interests abroad.
The Beirut bombings of 1983 was a big news story for its day, but you people are making it sound like it was the "9-11 attack" of its day. It wasn't viewed by people as a make or break event for the USA. This endless use of 20/20 hindsight to explain the Beirut bombing of 1983 is wrongheaded at best.
We knew who committed the West Berlin disco killings. We still don't know who committed the Beirut barracks bombing.
"In a September 2001 PBS Frontline interview, former DefSec Weinberger said: "we still do not have the actual knowledge of who did the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport, and we certainly didn't then".
Like I said, Reagan did order air strikes from the aircraft carriers Independence and Kennedy, and offshore shelling from the USS New Jersey. We damaged terrorist enclaves and we did kill some enemy combatants.
Your historic revisionism doesn't stand up to the historic facts.
Psssst, all you do is embarrass his name. You'd defend him better by shutting up about him.
Sort of like Clinton with the USS Cole bombers and the 1998 bombings, which led to 9/11.
You're stuck on stupid. The attackers are still unknown.
Rubbish. It was known back then that Hezbollah (and other radical Shia groups) was behind the suicide bombing .
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